A question which is curious in itself and may become important in the
future is this: How has migration to the new world affected
philosophical ideas? At first sight we might be tempted, perhaps, to
dismiss this question altogether, on the ground that no such effect is
discernible. For what do we find in America in the guise of philosophy?
In the background, the same Protestant theology as in Europe and the
same Catholic theology; on the surface, the same adoption of German
idealism, the same vogue of evolution, the same psychology becoming
metaphysics, and lately the same revival of a mathematical or logical
realism. In no case has the first expression of these various tendencies
appeared in America, and no original system that I know of has arisen
there. It would seem, then, that in philosophy, as in letters generally,
polite America has continued the common tradition of Christendom, in
paths closely parallel to those followed in England; and that modern
speculation, which is so very sensitive to changed times, is quite
indifferent to distinctions of place.
Perhaps; but I say advisedly _polite_ America, for without this
qualification what I have been suggesting would hardly be true. Polite
America carried over its household gods from puritan England in a spirit
of consecration, and it has always wished to remain in communion with
whatever its conscience might value in the rest of the world. Yet it has
been cut off by distance and by revolutionary prejudice against things
ancient or foreign; and it has been disconcerted at the same time by the
insensible shifting of the ground under its feet: it has suffered from
in‐breeding and anæmia. On the other hand, a crude but vital America has
sprung up from the soil, undermining, feeding, and transforming the
America of tradition.
This young America was originally composed of all the prodigals,
truants, and adventurous spirits that the colonial families produced: it
was fed continually by the younger generation, born in a spacious,
half‐empty world, tending to forget the old straitened morality and to
replace it by another, quite jovially human. This truly native America
was reinforced by the miscellany of Europe arriving later, not in the
hope of founding a godly commonwealth, but only of prospering in an
untrammelled one. The horde of immigrants eagerly accepts the external
arrangements and social spirit of American life, but never hears of its
original austere principles, or relegates them to the same willing
oblivion as it does the constraints which it has just escaped—Jewish,
Irish, German, Italian, or whatever they may be. We should be seriously
deceived if we overlooked for a moment the curious and complex relation
between these two Americas.
Let me give one illustration. Professor Norton, the friend of Carlyle,
of Burne‐Jones, and of Matthew Arnold, and, for the matter of that, the
friend of everybody, a most urbane, learned, and exquisite spirit, was
descended from a long line of typical New England divines: yet he was
loudly accused, in public and in private, of being un‐American. On the
other hand, a Frenchman of ripe judgement, who knew him perfectly, once
said to me: “Norton wouldn’t like to hear it, but he is a terrible
Yankee.” Both judgements were well grounded. Professor Norton’s mind was
deeply moralised, discriminating, and sad; and these qualities rightly
seemed American to the French observer of New England, but they rightly
seemed un‐American to the politician from Washington.
Philosophical opinion in America is of course rooted in the genteel
tradition. It is either inspired by religious faith, and designed to
defend it, or else it is created somewhat artificially in the larger
universities, by deliberately proposing problems which, without being
very pressing to most Americans, are supposed to be necessary problems
of thought. Yet if you expected academic philosophers in America,
because the background of their minds seems perfunctory, to resemble
academic philosophers elsewhere, you would be often mistaken. There is
no prig’s paradise in those regions. Many of the younger professors of
philosophy are no longer the sort of persons that might as well have
been clergymen or schoolmasters: they have rather the type of mind of a
doctor, an engineer, or a social reformer; the wide‐awake young man who
can do most things better than old people, and who knows it. He is less
eloquent and apostolic than the older generation of philosophers, very
professional in tone and conscious of his _Fach_; not that he would deny
for a moment the many‐sided ignorance to which nowadays we are all
reduced, but that he thinks he can get on very well without the things
he ignores. His education has been more pretentious than thorough; his
style is deplorable; social pressure and his own great eagerness have
condemned him to over‐work, committee meetings, early marriage,
premature authorship, and lecturing two or three times a day under
forced draught. He has no peace in himself, no window open to a calm
horizon, and in his heart perhaps little taste for mere scholarship or
pure speculation. Yet, like the plain soldier staggering under his
clumsy equipment, he is cheerful; he keeps his faith in himself and in
his allotted work, puts up with being toasted only on one side, remains
open‐minded, whole‐hearted, appreciative, helpful, confident of the
future of goodness and of science. In a word, he is a cell in that
teeming democratic body; he draws from its warm, contagious activities
the sanctions of his own life and, less consciously, the spirit of his
philosophy.
It is evident that such minds will have but a loose hold on tradition,
even on the genteel tradition in American philosophy. Not that in
general they oppose or dislike it; their alienation from it is more
radical; they forget it. Religion was the backbone of that tradition,
and towards religion, in so far as it is a private sentiment or
presumption, they feel a tender respect; but in so far as religion is a
political institution, seeking to coerce the mind and the conscience,
one would think they had never heard of it. They feel it is as much
every one’s right to choose and cherish a religion as to choose and
cherish a wife, without having his choice rudely commented upon in
public. Hitherto America has been the land of universal good‐will,
confidence in life, inexperience of poisons. Until yesterday it believed
itself immune from the hereditary plagues of mankind. It could not
credit the danger of being suffocated or infected by any sinister
principle. The more errors and passions were thrown into the
melting‐pot, the more certainly would they neutralise one another and
would truth come to the top. Every system was met with a frank gaze.
“Come on,” people seemed to say to it, “show us what you are good for.
We accept no claims; we ask for no credentials; we just give you a
chance. Plato, the Pope, and Mrs. Eddy shall have one vote each.” After
all, I am not sure that this toleration without deference is not a cruel
test for systematic delusions: it lets the daylight into the stage.
Philosophic tradition in America has merged almost completely in German
idealism. In a certain sense this system did not need to be adopted:
something very like it had grown up spontaneously in New England in the
form of transcendentalism and unitarian theology. Even the most
emancipated and positivistic of the latest thinkers—pragmatists, new
realists, pure empiricists—have been bred in the atmosphere of German
idealism; and this fact should not be forgotten in approaching their
views. The element of this philosophy which has sunk deepest, and which
is reinforced by the influence of psychology, is the critical attitude
towards knowledge, subjectivism, withdrawal into experience, on the
assumption that experience is something substantial. Experience was
regarded by earlier empiricists as a method for making real discoveries,
a safer witness than reasoning to what might exist in nature; but now
experience is taken to be in itself the only real existence, the
ultimate object that all thought and theory must regard. This empiricism
does not look to the building up of science, but rather to a more
thorough criticism and disintegration of conventional beliefs, those of
empirical science included. It is in the intrepid prosecution of this
criticism and disintegration that American philosophy has won its wings.
It may seem a strange Nemesis that a critical philosophy, which on
principle reduces everything to the consciousness of it, should end by
reducing consciousness itself to other things; yet the path of this
boomerang is not hard to trace. The word consciousness originally meant
what Descartes called thought or cogitation—the faculty which attention
has of viewing together objects which may belong together neither in
their logical essence nor in their natural existence. It colours events
with memories and facts with emotions, and adds images to words. This
synthetic and transitive function of consciousness is a positive fact
about it, to be discovered by study, like any other somewhat recondite
fact. You will discover it if you institute a careful comparison and
contrast between the way things hang together in thought and the way
they hang together in nature. To have discerned the wonderful
perspectives both of imagination and of will seems to me the chief
service done to philosophy by Kant and his followers. It is the
positive, the non‐malicious element in their speculation; and in the
midst of their psychologism in logic and their egotism about nature and
history, consciousness seems to be the one province of being which they
have thrown true light upon. But just because this is a positive
province of being, an actual existence to be discovered and dogmatically
believed in, it is not what a malicious criticism of knowledge can end
with. Not the nature of consciousness, but the data of consciousness,
are what the critic must fall back upon in the last resort; and Hume had
been in this respect a more penetrating critic than Kant. One cannot, by
inspecting consciousness, find consciousness itself as a passive datum,
because consciousness is cogitation; one can only take note of the
immediate objects of consciousness, in such private perspective as sense
or imagination may present.
Philosophy seems to be richer in theories than in words to express them
in; and much confusion results from the necessity of using old terms in
new meanings. In this way, when consciousness is disregarded, in the
proper sense of cogitation, the name of consciousness can be transferred
to the stream of objects immediately present to consciousness; so that
consciousness comes to signify the evolving field of appearances
unrolled before any person.
This equivocation is favoured by the allied ambiguity of an even
commoner term, idea. It is plausible to say that consciousness is a
stream of ideas, because an idea may mean an opinion, a cogitation, a
view taken of some object. And it is also plausible to say that ideas
are objects of consciousness, because an idea may mean an image, a
passive datum. Passive data may be of any sort you like—things,
qualities, relations, propositions—but they are never cogitations; and
to call _them_ consciousness or components of consciousness is false and
inexcusable. The ideas that may be so called are not these passive
objects, but active thoughts. Indeed, when the psychological critic has
made this false step, he is not able to halt: his method will carry him
presently from this position to one even more paradoxical.
Is memory knowledge of a past that is itself absent and dead, or is it a
present experience? A complete philosophy would doubtless reply that it
is both; but psychological criticism can take cognisance of memory only
as a mass of present images and presumptions. The experience remembered
may indeed be exactly recovered and be present again; but the fact that
it was present before cannot possibly be given now; it can only be
suggested and believed.
It is evident, therefore, that the historical order in which data flow
is not contained bodily in any one of them. This order is conceived; the
hypothesis is framed instinctively and instinctively credited, but it is
only an hypothesis. And it is often wrong, as is proved by all the
constitutional errors of memory and legend. Belief in the order of our
personal experiences is accordingly just as dogmatic, daring, and
realistic as the parallel belief in a material world. The psychological
critic must attribute both beliefs to a mere tendency to feign; and if
he is true to his method he must discard the notion that the objects of
consciousness are arranged in psychological sequences, making up
separate minds. In other words, he must discard the notion of
consciousness, not only in the sense of thought or cogitation, but in
the sense he himself had given it of a stream of ideas. Actual objects,
he will now admit, not without a certain surprise, are not ideas at all:
they do not lie in the mind (for there is no mind to be found) but in
the medium that observably surrounds them. Things are just what they
seem to be, and to say they are consciousness or compose a consciousness
is absurd. The so‐called appearances, according to a perfected criticism
of knowledge, are nothing private or internal; they are merely those
portions of external objects which from time to time impress themselves
on somebody’s organs of sense and are responded to by his nervous
system.
Such is the doctrine of the new American realists, in whose devoted
persons the logic of idealism has worked itself out and appropriately
turned idealism itself into its opposite. Consciousness, they began by
saying, is merely a stream of ideas; but then ideas are merely the parts
of objects which happen to appear to a given person; but again, a person
(for all you or he can discover) is nothing but his body and those parts
of other objects which appear to him; and, finally, to appear, in any
discoverable sense, cannot be to have a ghostly sort of mental
existence, but merely to be reacted upon by an animal body. Thus we come
to the conclusion that objects alone exist, and that consciousness is a
name for certain segments or groups of these objects.
I think we may conjecture why this startling conclusion, that
consciousness does not exist, a conclusion suggested somewhat hurriedly
by William James, has found a considerable echo in America, and why the
system of Avenarius, which makes in the same direction, has been studied
there sympathetically. To deny consciousness is to deny a pre‐requisite
to the obvious, and to leave the obvious standing alone. That is a
relief to an overtaxed and self‐impeded generation; it seems a blessed
simplification. It gets rid of the undemocratic notion that by being
very reflective, circumspect, and subtle you might discover something
that most people do not see. They can go on more merrily with their work
if they believe that by being so subtle, circumspect, and reflective you
would only discover a mare’s nest. The elimination of consciousness not
only restores the obvious, but proves all parts of the obvious to be
equally real. Not only colours, beauties, and passions, but all things
formerly suspected of being creatures of thought, such as laws,
relations, and abstract qualities, now become components of the existing
object, since there is no longer any mental vehicle by which they might
have been created and interposed. The young American is thus reassured:
his joy in living and learning is no longer chilled by the contempt
which idealism used to cast on nature for being imaginary and on science
for being intellectual. All fictions and all abstractions are now
declared to be parcels of the objective world; it will suffice to live
on, to live forward, in order to see everything as it really is.
If we look now at these matters from a slightly different angle, we
shall find psychological criticism transforming the notion of truth much
as it has transformed the notion of consciousness. In the first place,
there is a similar ambiguity in the term. The truth properly means the
sum of all true propositions, what omniscience would assert, the whole
ideal system of qualities and relations which the world has exemplified
or will exemplify. The truth is all things seen under the form of
eternity. In this sense, a psychological criticism cannot be pertinent
to the truth at all, the truth not being anything psychological or
human. It is an ideal realm of being properly enough not discussed by
psychologists; yet so far as I know it is denied by nobody, not even by
Protagoras or the pragmatists. If Protagoras said that whatever appears
to any man at any moment is true, he doubtless meant true on that
subject, true of that appearance: because for a sensualist objects do
not extend beyond what he sees of them, so that each of his perceptions
defines its whole object and is infallible. But in that case the truth
about the universe is evidently that it is composed of these various
sensations, each carrying an opinion impossible for it to abandon or to
revise, since to revise the opinion would simply be to bring a fresh
object into view. The truth would further be that these sensations and
opinions stand to one another in certain definite relations of
diversity, succession, duration, _et cætera_, whether any of them
happens to assert these relations or not. In the same way, I cannot find
that our contemporary pragmatists, in giving their account of what truth
is (in a different and quite abstract sense of the word truth), have
ever doubted, or so much as noticed, what in all their thinking they
evidently assume to be the actual and concrete truth: namely, that there
are many states of mind, many labouring opinions more or less useful and
good, which actually lead to others, more or less expected and
satisfactory. Surely every pragmatist, like every thinking man, always
assumes the reality of an actual truth, comprehensive and largely
undiscovered, of which he claims to be reporting a portion. What he
rather confusingly calls truth, and wishes to reduce to a pragmatic
function, is not this underlying truth, the sum of all true
propositions, but merely the abstract quality which all true
propositions must have in common, to be called true. By truth he means
only correctness. The possibility of correctness in an idea is a great
puzzle to him, on account of his idealism, which identifies ideas with
their objects; and he asks himself how an idea can ever come to be
correct or incorrect, as if it referred to something beyond itself.
The fact is, of course, that an idea can be correct or incorrect only if
by the word idea we mean not a datum but an opinion; and the abstract
relation of correctness, by virtue of which any opinion is true, is
easily stated. An opinion is true if what it is talking about is
constituted as the opinion asserts it to be constituted. To test this
correctness may be difficult or even impossible in particular cases; in
the end we may be reduced to believing on instinct that our fundamental
opinions are true; for instance, that we are living through time, and
that the past and future are not, as a consistent idealism would assert,
mere notions in the present. But what renders such instinctive opinions
true, if they are true, is the fact affirmed being as it is affirmed to
be. It is not a question of similarity or derivation between a passive
datum and a hidden object; it is a question of identity between the fact
asserted and the fact existing. If an opinion could not freely leap to
its object, no matter how distant or hypothetical, and assert something
of that chosen object, an opinion could not be so much as wrong; for it
would not be an opinion about anything.
Psychologists, however, are not concerned with what an opinion asserts
logically, but only with what it is existentially; they are asking what
existential relations surround an idea when it is called true which are
absent when it is called false. Their problem is frankly insoluble; for
it requires us to discover what makes up the indicative force of an idea
which by hypothesis is a passive datum; as if a grammarian should
inquire how a noun in the accusative case could be a verb in the
indicative mood.
It was not idly that William James dedicated his book on Pragmatism to
the memory of John Stuart Mill. The principle of psychological
empiricism is to look for the elements employed in thinking, and to
conclude that thought is nothing but those elements arranged in a
certain order. It is true that since the days of Mill analysis has
somewhat extended the inventory of these elements, so as to include
among simples, besides the data of the five senses, such things as
feelings of relation, sensations of movement, vague ill‐focused images,
and perhaps even telepathic and instinctive intuitions. But some series
or group of these immediate data, kept in their crude immediacy, must
according to this method furnish the whole answer to our question: the
supposed power of an idea to have an object beyond itself, or to be true
of any other fact, must be merely a name for a certain position which
the given element occupies in relation to other elements in the routine
of experience. Knowledge and truth must be forms of contiguity and
succession.
We must not be surprised, under these circumstances, if the problem is
shifted, and another somewhat akin to it takes its place, with which the
chosen method can really cope. This subterfuge is not voluntary; it is
an instinctive effect of fidelity to a point of view which has its
special validity, though naturally not applicable in every sphere. We do
not observe that politicians abandon their party when it happens to have
brought trouble upon the country; their destiny as politicians is
precisely to make effective all the consequences, good or evil, which
their party policy may involve. So it would be too much to expect a
school of philosophers to abandon their method because there are
problems it cannot solve; their business is rather to apply their method
to everything to which it can possibly be applied; and when they have
reached that limit, the very most we can ask, if they are superhumanly
modest and wise, is that they should make way gracefully for another
school of philosophers.
Now there is a problem, not impossible to confuse with the problem of
correctness in ideas, with which psychological criticism can really
deal; it is the question of the relation between a sign and the thing
signified. Of this relation a genuinely empirical account can be given;
both terms are objects of experience, present or eventual, and the
passage between them is made in time by an experienced transition. Nor
need the signs which lead to a particular object be always the same, or
of one sort; an object may be designated and announced unequivocally by
a verbal description, without any direct image, or by images now of one
sense and now of another, or by some external relation, such as its
place, or by its proper name, if it possesses one; and these
designations all convey knowledge of it and may be true signs, if in
yielding to their suggestion we are brought eventually to the object
meant.
Here, if I am not mistaken, is the genuine application of what the
pragmatists call their theory of truth. It concerns merely what links a
sign to the thing signified, and renders it a practical substitute for
the same. But this empirical analysis of signification has been
entangled with more or less hazardous views about truth, such as that an
idea is true so long as it is believed to be true, or that it is true if
it is good and useful, or that it is not true until it is verified. This
last suggestion shows what strange reversals a wayward personal
philosophy may be subject to. Empiricism used to mean reliance on the
past; now apparently all empirical truth regards only the future, since
truth is said to arise by the verification of some presumption.
Presumptions about the past can evidently never be verified; at best
they may be corroborated by fresh presumptions about the past, equally
dependent for their truth on a verification which in the nature of the
case is impossible. At this point the truly courageous empiricist will
perhaps say that the real past only means the ideas of the past which we
shall form in the future. Consistency is a jewel; and, as in the case of
other jewels, we may marvel at the price that some people will pay for
it. In any case, we are led to this curious result: that radical
empiricism ought to deny that any idea of the past can be true at all.
Such dissolving views, really somewhat like those attributed to
Protagoras, do not rest on sober psychological analysis: they express
rather a certain impatience and a certain despairing democracy in the
field of opinion. Great are the joys of haste and of radicalism, and
young philosophers must not be deprived of them. We may the more justly
pass over these small scandals of pragmatism in that William James and
his American disciples have hardly cared to defend them, but have turned
decidedly in the direction of a universal objectivism.
The spirit of these radical views is not at all negative: it is hopeful,
revolutionary, inspired entirely by love of certitude and clearness. It
is very sympathetic to science, in so far as science is a personal
pursuit and a personal experience, rather than a body of doctrine with
moral implications. It is very close to nature, as the lover of nature
understands the word. If it denies the existence of the cognitive energy
and the colouring medium of mind, it does so only in a formal sense; all
the colours with which that medium endows the world remain painted upon
it; and all the perspectives and ideal objects of thought are woven into
the texture of things. Not, I think, intelligibly or in a coherent
fashion; for this new realism is still immature, and if it is ever
rendered adequate it will doubtless seem much less original. My point is
that in its denial of mind it has no bias against things intellectual,
and if it refuses to admit ideas or even sensations, it does not blink
the sensible or ideal objects which ideas and sensations reveal, but
rather tries to find a new and (as it perhaps thinks) a more honourable
place for them; they are not regarded as spiritual radiations from the
natural world, but as parts of its substance.
This may have the ring of materialism; but the temper and faith of these
schools are not materialistic. Systematic materialism is one of the
philosophies of old age. It is a conviction that may overtake a few
shrewd and speculative cynics, who have long observed their own
irrationality and that of the world, and have divined its cause; by such
men materialism may be embraced without reserve, in all its rigour and
pungency. But the materialism of youth is part of a simple faith in
sense and in science; it is not exclusive; it admits the co‐operation of
any other forces—divine, magical, formal, or vital—if appearances
anywhere seem to manifest them. The more we interpret the ambiguities or
crudities of American writers in this sense, the less we shall
misunderstand them.
It seems, then, that the atmosphere of the new world has already
affected philosophy in two ways. In the first place, it has accelerated
and rendered fearless the disintegration of conventional categories; a
disintegration on which modern philosophy has always been at work, and
which has precipitated its successive phases. In the second place, the
younger cosmopolitan America has favoured the impartial assemblage and
mutual confrontation of all sorts of ideas. It has produced, in
intellectual matters, a sort of happy watchfulness and insecurity. Never
was the human mind master of so many facts and sure of so few
principles. Will this suspense and fluidity of thought crystallise into
some great new system? Positive gifts of imagination and moral heroism
are requisite to make a great philosopher, gifts which must come from
the gods and not from circumstances. But if the genius should arise,
this vast collection of suggestions and this radical analysis of
presumptions which he will find in America may keep him from going
astray. Nietzsche said that the earth has been a mad‐house long enough.
Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and
say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts. It
is time for it to become less solemn and more serious. We may be
frightened at first to learn on what thin ice we have been skating, in
speculation as in government; but we shall not be in a worse plight for
knowing it, only wiser to‐day and perhaps safer to‐morrow.